This series delves into the world of music, exploring specific works, repertoires, and practices within their broader historical, critical, and socio-economic contexts. It aims to connect musical analysis with the cultural and social environments in which music is created and experienced. The collection encourages a fresh perspective on what contexts are relevant for studying music, pushing the boundaries of musicology into new theoretical directions and interdisciplinary explorations. It offers a compelling read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of music's richness and impact.
Rufus Hallmark sets Schumann's famous song cycle in the context of the challenges and social expectations faced by women in early nineteenth-century Germany. His study offers insights on Schumann's composing materials, reception of the song cycle, other contemporary poems about women, and comparisons with other musical settings of the poems.
This unique publication offers fresh perspectives on key manuscript sources of medieval song. In ten chapters, leading experts each treat a single manuscript in detail, offering new findings, essential summaries of each manuscript's contents and historiography, and detailed, accessible analyses of the songs' music and texts.
This work presents a groundbreaking and interdisciplinary analysis that reshapes the perception of a fascinating early twentieth-century composer. It delves into various aspects of the composer's life and contributions, providing fresh insights that challenge conventional interpretations and deepen appreciation for their music and influence.
A fresh evaluation of Mozart's Requiem which focuses on historical and current understandings in fiction, drama, film, criticism and performance.
Exploring the philosophical dimensions of Brahms's music, this book analyzes his elegiac works and their relationship to German literature. Of interest to musicology, German studies and cultural history scholars, it illuminates how Brahms's music relates to aesthetics and modernity from Hoelderlin, Schiller, and Goethe to the Frankfurt School.
J. P. E. Harper-Scott's book proposes a new theory of musical modernism, bringing contemporary philosophy into contact with music theory and interpretation. It explores the capacity for music to challenge cultural and political ideas and provides a critique of modern music histories.
The first detailed contextual study of Beethoven's middle-period quartets, encompassing reception history, early performance practices, aesthetic contexts and theatrical impetus.
Presents new methodologies to explore medieval processes of musical and poetic creation, from plainchant and vernacular French songs to organa, motets and clausulae. Engages with questions of text-music relationships, liturgy, and the development of notational technologies, exploring authorship, originality, practices of quotation and reworking.
Rufus Hallmark interprets Schumann's famously controversial song cycle in the social, literary, and musical contexts of contemporary German society.